BLACK STAR: 100 YEARS OF BLACK EXCELLENT ON THE BIG SCREEN to December 22 at the TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King West). $10-$14. tiff.net/blackstar.
Dee Rees’s rich and multifaceted Jim Crow-era drama Mudbound hits Netflix this weekend. That’s followed by the new series She’s Gotta Have It, where Spike Lee adapts his original joint about a Black woman and her sexual freedom.
Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight won the Oscar. Jordan Peele’s Get Out could be the best film of the year. And we’re not exactly starved for Black television, with Atlanta, Queen Sugar, Insecure and Chewing Gum.
“We’re living in an incredible era,” says TIFF artistic director Cameron Bailey.
“I can’t think of another time in history when there’s been so much remarkable work being made by and about Black people. But this is new. What preceded this is a 100-year history of Black artists struggling to open up space for representation of our lives that wasn’t stereotyped, negative, insulting and sometimes dangerous.”
That’s what TIFF’s sprawling new retrospective Black Star is all about.
The program kicked off on November 3 with a 4K restoration of Norman Jewison’s In The Heat Of The Night, featuring Sidney Poitier’s dignified turn as a detective showing racist white southerners the back of his hand. It screens again this Friday (November 17) and is followed by Malcolm X on Saturday (November 18), where Poitier’s heir apparent Denzel Washington delivers a blistering take on the controversial Black leader.
The baton pass between Poitier and Washington is just one of the many (r)evolutionary steps you can chew on in Black Star, a program so expansive in both its selections and themes (it’s got Eddie Murphy’s Coming To America and Julie Dash’s The Diary Of An African Nun) that coming up with a single throughline for the whole thing is a quick way to get twisted. Instead, there are strands that interwine, hang and linger.
The tragic mulatta in John M. Stahl’s Imitation Of Life, which screened last Sunday, is complimented by Lena Horne’s big musical turn in Stormy Weather, screening on December 2 alongside Julie Dash’s Illusions. The musical note in Stormy Weather evolves into Perry Henzell’s The Harder They Come (December 10) and Sidney J. Furie’s Lady Sings The Blues (December 21).
And if you’re asking yourself why Halle Berry isn’t in Black Star with Monster’s Ball, continuing the tragic mulatta history, or where Straight Outta Compton should fit among the musicals, those are questions Bailey hopes you’ll discuss afterwards at dinner or brunch. The program isn’t meant to close out a circle or see a narrative through to its end, but instead to spark engagement and conversations that continue after you exit the Lightbox.
That dialogue is essential to TIFF’s new focus. A strategic plan announced in August declared that Toronto’s cinephile mecca can’t just rely on showing films it’s got to be about delivering “transformative experiences through film.”
TIFF’s Cameron Bailey knows that movie audiences need extra motivation to leave their homes.
“When we started 42 years ago, it was enough just to have a film you couldn’t see anywhere else,” says Bailey.
He echoes an entire industry responding to a climate where films are widely available through streaming platforms and audiences need extra motivation to leave their homes.
“The win isn’t when you secure the film. It’s when people leave the theatre different than when they went in. And that experience is what we’re working on.”
Cineplex is adapting with 4DX auditoriums that make you feel like you’re sitting through the delicate wash cycle, or their new deal airing NFL games on the big screen. TIFF is looking at alternative methods both new and tried-and-true that complement the experience of watching films: 70mm presentations and Q&As whenever possible are the obvious choices.
“But we haven’t always curated that experience and focused on it in the same way that we have the films,” says Bailey.
“How do you make sure that the intro gets the juices flowing, gets people excited, gets them thinking about how to watch the film? And that the Q&A is similarly shaped so that it’s not the obvious questions, so that there’s an element of surprise and going deeper, so its not just ‘What was your budget and how long did it take you to make it?’ You get those questions all the time. That experience has to be shaped as well.”
TIFF is also exploring other interactive elements to enhance the film experience.
For its current run of Palme d’Or winning art-world satire The Square, the Lightbox created an installation (a square) in its lobby, if only for visitors to take a selfie and post on Instagram. For the hand-painted Van Gogh bio Loving Vincent, TIFF commissioned Toronto artist Jessie Durham to recreate the painter’s The Starry Night on the Lightbox’s west wall. They created a time-lapse video of the process found on their YouTube page.
That YouTube page also hosts original content for the Black Star program (like a feature on Paul Robeson), as does TIFF’s blog The Review and their podcast TIFF Long Take, all avenues to engage a media-savvy generation with their programming and the conversations to make these films “transformative.”
And even if TIFF adds no bells and whistles to a particular presentation, there is still considerable power in programming, positioning and choices inspiring their own dialogue.
Take, for instance, Black Star’s exclusion of titles like New Jack City, Boyz N The Hood and Menace II Society, urban crime thrillers that left a distinct mark on Black cinema in the early 90s.
Instead, the program opts for a title that drifted in as that sub-genre was dying out: Set It Off (December 17).
The Thelma-And-Louise-inspired heist thriller directed by F. Gary Gray stars Jada Pinkett Smith, Queen Latifah, Vivica A. Fox and Kimberly Elise as women who are pushed to their breaking point and take to robbing banks. It also has a catchy soundtrack featuring En Vogue’s final hit Don’t Let Go.
“That’s a more interesting take on those 90s Black crime movies than maybe some of the other ones that we saw,” says Bailey.
Set It Off may not be celebrated in Black cinema’s canon in the same way as its predecessors, but its placement in Black Star should invite audiences to reconsider: the all-female action movie (released decades before “all-female” became a buzzy marketing tool) the queer character played by Queen Latifah whose orientation is treated as casual and matter-of-fact the anger coursing through a movie that remains heartbreakingly relevant today.
A transformative experience could be revisiting a movie that’s been there all along, and realizing for the first time that you’ve never seen anything like it.
movies@nowtoronto.com | @justsayrad
